Development & Aid, Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean, Population

VENEZUELA: Soup Kitchens Expand Social Safety Nets

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, May 7 2004 (IPS) - At noon every day, five volunteers overseen by community activist María Machado hand out 150 free lunches to children and the elderly – just one example of a new programme aimed at strengthening Venezuela’s social safety nets, launched by the government of President Hugo Chávez.

The ‘Maximum Protection’ programme serves two balanced meals a day, six days a week, to the neediest residents of the poor Caracas neighbourhood of La Vega.

The day that IPS made an unannounced visit to Machado’s small house, her assistants were serving ‘pabellón’, a typical Venezuelan meal of beef, black beans, rice and slices of banana.

When asked why cooked meals were served, instead of simply distributing food supplies, Machado said ”Because this way we make sure that the neediest will eat, and that the food will not be sold.”

Moreover, she added, ”this is a balanced diet that covers several weeks, designed by the National Nutrition Institute, which means that this way, people will vary the food they eat.”

”Sometimes, people like us do not have gas or oil for cooking, and these lunches take care of at least one meal,” Sara, a mother of two who was in the line outside of Machado’s house, commented to IPS.

The names of the people enrolled in the new programme were proposed by local activists and groups like urban land committees, cultural, youth and sports centres, cooperatives, city government bodies, and especially those who run the ‘Barrio adentro’ (Into the Neighbourhood) programme, which has brought health care to poor urban areas in this South American country.

‘Barrio adentro’ focuses on preventive family medicine, based on the work of hundreds of Cuban doctors who are lending their services in slums and other poor neighbourhoods in Caracas and other cities. Local residents in those areas not only provide the doctors with housing, but with rooms in their homes to set up makeshift clinics as well.

The ‘Maximum Protection’ programme will work closely with the Mercal – short for Mercados de Alimentos or food markets – plan created by Chávez a year ago, which provides subsidised foodstuffs to the residents of poor neighbourhoods.

Rafael Mora, the head of Mercal in Caracas, told IPS that in La Vega, 26 soup kitchens will operate out of homes like Machado’s. The goal is to set up a total of 1,000 in this city of more than four million, to serve 150,000 hungry people.

La Vega is a crowded neighbourhood on the southwest side of the capital where 100,000 people live in haphazardly placed cinder block houses and shacks.

To supply the new community soup kitchens like Machado’s with food, the government is using the Mercal warehouses and shopfronts, several of which are located in La Vega.

Around 20 subsidised products are sold in the Mercal shops, including rice, pasta, chicken and sausages produced in Venezuela, vegetable fat from Brazil, and baby formula imported from Spain.

The cost of the products sold in the Mercal shops is 20 to 40 percent lower than the prices found in supermarkets. However, the impact of that assistance has been reduced by the fact that prices of foodstuffs rose 40 percent last year, according to the Central Bank.

Mora said there is also an intermediate programme between the Mercal shops and the ‘Maximum Protection’ soup kitchens, which sells poor families products at half the price of the Mercal subsidised food items.

In Venezuela, an oil-rich country of more than 25 million, ”18 percent of the population (4.5 million people) suffer from hunger, with an average daily deficit of 200 calories,” reports Elisa Panadés, the local representative of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

Maritza Landaeta, with Fundacredesa, the leading Venezuelan body on nutrition research, called for a strengthening of the social programmes created by the Chávez administration, pointing out that ”13 percent of children under two are malnourished, as well as one-quarter of children between the ages of two and 14.”

The new soup kitchen plan also provides an opportunity for building stronger community participation and social activism.

Machado, for example, lives in the middle of a labyrinthine network of narrow passages less than two metres wide that climbs up a hillside and is located far from the nearest road.

”We make arrangements with kids who sometimes fall into the temptation of drugs, offering them meals in exchange for carrying up the bags and crates of food supplies, to incorporate them into healthy neighbourhood activities,” she said.

Machado’s group of community activists hope to receive pay for their work once the programme is fully implemented. For now, they just receive stipends to cover expenses. But, she underlined, all of them joined the plan as volunteers.

”We believe in what Chávez is doing,” said Machado. ”He is our source of spiritual strength, and the best thing that has happened to us.”

The left-leaning Chávez has carried out a ‘Bolivarian social revolution’, whose name invokes independence hero Símon Bolívar’s legacy of Latin American unity.

Another of Chávez’s social initiatives is the ‘Mission Robinson’ volunteer-based adult literacy campaign targeting the one million Venezuelans who cannot read or write.

Argenis Martínez, who has lent part of her home to be used as a clinic by the ‘Barrio adentro’ programme, told IPS that ”opponents and supporters of Chávez, as well as people who aren’t on either side – they all come here. They are all attended. These are community programmes, and if Chávez is removed, whoever replaces him will have to continue these plans.”

She was referring to an opposition drive to trigger a recall referendum, aimed at removing Chávez from office before his term ends in January 2007.

”In La Vega there is a tradition of popular struggle and community work that dates back to long before Chávez came to power” in 1999, another activist, Haydée Romero, remarked to IPS. ”But now people feel that there is a government that understands their struggle and pays attention to their needs.”

When Chávez was overthrown for two days in a short-lived coup d’etat in April 2002, thousands of people from La Vega swelled the crowds that surrounded Fort Tiuna, the main military installation in Caracas, demanding that the armed forces free their leader and reinstate him as president.

”We organised households to take care of other families’ children and the sick, to send as many men and women as we could to Fort Tiuna,” said Romero.

”In our homes we cooked 100 or more ‘arepas’ (typical Venezuelan corn flour rolls) to send to our people, to help them endure until we won.

”The coup plotters took us by surprise, but that won’t happen again,” she added. ”This time we’re much better prepared.”